Interesting, but at least will put a damn "SHUT UP" tag on all those who still couldn't believe it would be true eventually.There is an individual AMD XP-64, and it will come out, period!

That aside, it's nothing new, just 64-bit support basically, with a minor setback in performance since it uses some odd mode for 32-bit support. (didn't know it was needed for that)

--<A HREF="http://www.lochel.com/THGC/album.html" target="_new"><font color=blue><b>Are you ugly and looking into showing your mug? Then the THGC Album is the right place for you!</b></font color=blue></A>

Then it will be a very expensive OS because it will useful for somewhat of a nitch market (at least for the time being). I'm surprised they couldn't include a 32-bit safe mode or something like that.

In operating systems class a few years back, I learned that the Windows 3.11 OS had a "Standard Mode" for 16-bit 286 Processors and a "386 Enhanced Mode" for 32-bit CPUs. Why couldn't Microsoft design this OS to be as scalable as Windows 3.11 was?

My OS features preemptive multitasking, a fully interactive command line, & support for 640K of RAM!

If i am not mistaken win 3.1 was ALL 16 bit...i think you may getting confused with the "real" and "protected" mode of the 286...in order to access 1mb of ram it needed to switch into the protected mode...

Win 3.1 was all 16 bit, while Win 3.11 started as 16 bit, with 32 bit enhanced drivers available later on...

I ran Win 3.11 with the 32 bit drivers on one of my comps until August of 96 (Over a year after Win95(A) was released), only because I didn't like the aesthetics of the way 95 looked and I wanted to compare a Win3x system vs a Win95 system...to see if Win95 was REALLY all that it was cracked up to be...

[nostalgia]

...ahhhh...the days of file manager...

[/nostalgia]

<font color=blue> Ok, so you have to put your "2 cents" in, but its value is only "A penny's worth". Who gets that extra penny? </font color=blue>

Real (Standard Mode) – the original 8086 operation. Addressing is made by direct combination of Segment:Offset where the segment was shifted 4 bits and the offset was added to this. This limited each segment to 64k and had a max addressing of 1mb. All segments have a privilege level of 0. This is the startup mode of all x86 processors.

Protected mode – 286+ This is where the fun begins as does all the other modes of operation. Depending on the descriptor tables you can produce a variety of environments that can be either 16 or 32 bit as well as paged or identity mapped, with a privilege level of 0-3.

Windows 3.1 ran in Real (Standard) mode under VCPI (virtual control program interface)

Long before windows 3.1 there was DPMI (dos protected mode interface) often provided by a loader like DOS4GW. This allowed full 32 bit flat mode operation. In windows, WIN386.EXE provided this function as the DPMI server. This would be 386 Enhanced mode.

I'm confused now. On the first test I thought it was drilled into are heads that Windows could not run on 8-bit proccessors like the Intel 8088. I think the 8086 was actually a little bit more advanced than the 8088 though If my own memory serves me correctly though. Hence, that would lead to names like the 2<b>86</b>, 3<b>86</b>, 4<b>86</b>, & 5<b>86</b> (Pentium).

Do you know any more about this Schmide? Were the early builds of Windows versions able to run on the 8086?

My OS features preemptive multitasking, a fully interactive command line, & support for 640K of RAM!

The 8088 was a 16 bit processor (16 bit registers) with an 8 bit bus only capable of real mode. The 8086 was an identical to this but had a 16 bit bus. Early versions of Windows ran over dos and ran on below a 286. (versions 1 and 2 (maybe 3.0 but I’m not sure and I don’t think anyone would want to)). My first version of Windows ran on a 386dx20.